[TowerTalk] Cables on US Tower Crankups

[Charlie Summers]

Hello to all:

With help and assistance from K1ER, John Peters, I am currently having a
custom set of cable arms fabricated locally.  These are going to be made
out of 6 gauge square stock instead of the I believe 11 gauge that US
Towers supplies.  Within the first year, I have broken two top cable
arms and I am tired of messing with a bad system for routing coax.

The arms I am fabricating are spaced 15-45 degrees apart.  When viewed
from below, no two arms line up as they are all fanned out.  At the end
of each arm is a rotating U channel into which the coax is taped or held
in place with a U bolt.  Now, when the tower is lowered, the coax hangs
in loops that are half the length of the tower section because the U
channels rotate and become horizontal to the ground.  Since the coax
arms have varying angles between them as well as spaced varying
distances off the tower, none of the coax loops should become tangled.
All loops are isolated from each other.

This also serves to keep the coax from falling helter skelter on the
ground when lowering the tower.  This also keeps all the coax off the
ground.  In Colorado, this means that during a storm, the coax cannot
get frozen to the ground, resulting in disaster when raising the tower
again.  

BTW, my tower is the 89 foot job so there is lots of coax to deal with.

I will let the reflector know what my experiences are with this scheme.

73,

Charlie, W0YG..>>

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